Judicial Profile

HON. Marc D. Lauper
Commissioner

Superior Court of California County of Los Angeles 

        Friends and colleagues know him as the master storyteller who keeps them laughing. The chocolate lovers who work closely with him call him the Candy Man. To his kids and grandkids, he's the best-darned history teacher and tour guide there is, period. His clerk says he's nothing but a big old teddy bear.
        But when Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Marc D. Lauper dons his robe, he takes on a strikingly different persona. He becomes a veritable army of one.
        "This is the front lines of the judicial system," Lauper said. "This is where the law meets the public."
        His mission is to engage, single-handedly, the advancing wave of traffic cases that invade his calendar each day at the Pomona Courthouse.
        At the same time, he must gallantly uphold his sworn duty to level the courtroom battlefield - a battlefield where legions of uniformed traffic officers face off daily against everyday people who may have committed relatively minor offenses - folks Lauper calls "the good people."
        Division 1 is where most people have their first encounter with the court, he says, and it's never pleasant.
        But lately, motorists who get simple traffic tickets are in for an ordeal that most certainly will require them to give up either a lot of their time or a lot of their money - or both.
        "And they're not bad people," Lauper said. "It's our kids. It's our neighbors."
        After 23 years presiding over traffic court in Pomona, Lauper, 62, knows most every courtroom tactic and maneuver, lawyers say, and he's amazingly efficient at handling the increasing number of cases that come to him each day.
        Moreno Valley attorney William S. Tilton says he's seen a big increase in traffic cases in the last year or so, and he's impressed with how Lauper is able keep up.
        "Every time I've been there, he's handled the court as if it's not overloaded," Tilton said.
        Pomona attorney Gary W. Meastas says it can't be as easy as it looks.
        "I think he's got a very difficult job handling such a high volume," Meastas said.
        Lauper admits he's frustrated, however, because appellate rulings, recent legislation and countywide Superior Court policies are making it increasingly difficult for the average person in his area to navigate easily through the system.
        It's a one-size-fits-all system, he says, that may work in other places but simply leads to a bigger caseload in Pomona.
        The volume of cases, however, has no apparent impact on Lauper's courtroom demeanor or his productivity, attorneys who appear before him say.
        "He's even-handed," Meastas said. "He listens. He lets people explain their side of the story."
        Pomona attorney Antonio J. Bestard says he, too, admires the way Lauper treats the people in his courtroom, even if they start acting up.
        "Even with the jerks, he can diffuse their jerkiness," Bestard said of Lauper. "He's able to diffuse them by changing his demeanor to that of a very strict father."
        And Lauper knows the law inside and out, Bestard says.
        "He should be a judge and not a commissioner," Bestard said.
        Layne L. Liddle of the Glendora firm Liddle & Liddle says she's been appearing before Lauper for as long as he's been on the bench.
        "He's one of the best, and he deserves all the credit he gets," Liddle said. "I'm surprised, after all these years, that he hasn't been elevated to the level of judge."
        Most attorneys know Lauper more as an expert on handling landlord-tenant cases, an assignment he had to give up last year when he became the full-time traffic commissioner.
        "His level of knowledge in the landlord-tenant field is unsurpassed," Liddle said, "and it's really a loss for all of us in the profession for him not to be hearing cases.
        "Instead, he's stuck doing traffic matters."
        Bestard, who represents truckers in traffic court, says he marvels at how Lauper can handle such a challenging caseload, especially when so many new rules exacerbate the whole process.
        For example, Lauper says, motorists who get cited for not carrying their driver's license with them must now appear before him so he can read them their rights - rights, he says, that nobody in their right mind would demand.
        Instead of showing the window clerk their valid driver's license and paying a $10 fine, they must now hear Lauper advise them that they have the right to have their infraction treated as a misdemeanor and to make their case in front of a jury.
        "Not one person has demanded that it be treated as a misdemeanor," Lauper said. "Not one."
        "The system is set up to swamp him," Bestard said. "They're killing him with work he shouldn't have to do."
        Hard work, obedience and empathy were part of Lauper's Mormon upbringing in Oakland.
        From an early age, he developed a keen interest in World War II and the Civil War.
        "I read all about the military leaders," he said. "I wanted to know what made them what they became, why they became that way."
        While he read about military missions, he worked to save the money he would need to go on his own mission, a church mission to France.
        He got some help from a family friend who hired Lauper to help him construct apartment buildings.
        "This builder had a great influence on my life," Lauper said.
        When he needed more money, his boss, Carl Decker, gave him an interesting assignment: He asked the 18-year-old to tear down a three-story house, all by himself - instructions not included.
        He gave Lauper a small bulldozer to use on the hillside structure. Lauper had never driven a bulldozer before.
        "I took the bulldozer, and I went straight in the living room window and just crashed right through it," Lauper said.
        The living room was on the top floor.
        "The building started to creak and crack, and I collapsed right through," he said.
        The bulldozer had a steel cage to protect him from falling debris, but Lauper kept crashing through one floor after another.
        "I went down to the second floor, and then I went down to the third floor," he recalled.
        "Then I just drove through the back of it," Lauper said, "right through the back wall."
        He eventually used the bulldozer to dig a hole. Then he pulled the structure down, using cables, and burned everything in the pit.
        "All of my friends were very envious of me," Lauper said. "It was so fun."
        With the money he made on that job, Lauper was able to travel to France, where he spent 21/2 years serving his church and learning about people from another part of the world.
        He had attended Oakland City College before he went to France, he said. When he returned, he enrolled in Brigham Young University in Utah.
        He was accepted at the University of Utah Law School, but he opted, instead, to attend the newly opened law school at the University of California, Davis.
        After he graduated in 1970, he accepted a job as a Los Angeles County prosecutor.
        Lauper had spent three years with the district attorney's office when an ailing friend asked him to take over his Glendora law practice.
        "I weighed my options, and I did it," Lauper said.
        He concentrated on juvenile and criminal law.
        "I had a really good practice," he said. "All the judges I had met when I was with the DA had faith in me."
        That helped when the Pomona Municipal Court needed another commissioner.
        "They said, 'Why don't you put your name in?' So they hired me," he said.
        For more than two decades, Lauper heard traffic, small-claims and unlawful-detainer cases.
        In April, his assignment changed to doing traffic cases almost exclusively. He hears a few small-claims appeals every week, he says.
        "I love the job," Lauper said. "Not many people have the opportunity to do what I've done."
        When he's not at work, Lauper enjoys rooting for the USC Trojans as well as boating and fishing on the waters of the Sacramento River Delta.
        And he collects military books and videos.
        "Last year, I read 13 books on military history," he said. "My family makes fun of me, but I just love it."
        The truth is that they love it, too - at least the way he shares his passion with them. His wife, Mimi Lauper, and his children, Danielle Blocker, Kimberlee Jordan, Ryan Lauper, Bronson Lauper and Heidi Nemeth, have always enjoyed accompanying him to battlefields all over the United States, he said. Even his eight grandchildren are getting history lessons from him.
        And when they arrive at a site, it's not uncommon for Lauper to have everyone remove their shoes and stand in the snow, the way George Washington's soldiers did at Valley Forge.
        "You have to have a fire in your belly," he said. "And that's why people always want me to talk about these things."
        Not long ago, he took the family to Germany, to visit one of his daughters, where her husband was serving in the military. They stayed in Munich, not far from Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp.
        Lauper had never been there before, but he'd read books about it.
        "As soon as I saw it," he said, "it was like I had been there."
        Lauper didn't need to enlist the docents there to show him and his family around.
        "I started telling my family about the history, the political prisoners and all that.
        "Pretty soon, the head docent came over to me and said, 'You have to be licensed to lead tours.' And I said, 'No, I'm just talking to my kids - my family.'
        "He said, 'No. Look around here.'"
        When Lauper turned around, he saw a large group of tourists hanging on his every word.
        Lauper seems to have a history of drawing people into his family; the people who work in his courtroom say he has a way of treating them as if they were part of the Lauper clan.
        Retired courtroom clerk Sunda McIver remembers how Lauper could tell if she weren't feeling well.
        "If I was in a down mood, depressed, he'd say, 'Come here and have a piece of candy,'" McIver said.
        His clerk, Dina Cheney, says people who see Lauper only on the bench don't know what he's really like.
        "He's really a nice, big, lovable guy," Cheney said.
        Her husband, William M. Cheney, was a musician when he met Lauper, but the commissioner was determined to change the course of the man's life. Lauper encouraged him to go to law school.
        "He kept sending me stuff about colleges," Cheney said.
        Cheney took Lauper's advice and enrolled in law school. When he graduated and passed the State Bar Exam in 2003, Cheney was going to ask a judge in the Fontana courthouse, where he appeared a lot, to swear him in as a lawyer, he says.
        Lauper wouldn't allow it.
        "'You know, Bill, your parents should really see you being sworn in,'" he recalled Lauper telling him.
        "Commissioner Lauper took the time on Thanksgiving Day and drove all the way from Hacienda Heights to Calimesa," Cheney said.
        Calimesa is in Riverside County.
        "He brought his robe and swore me in at my parents' house," Cheney said. "You should have seen the look on my parents' faces when Commissioner Lauper put his arm around me."
        "It's probably the single nicest thing anyone has done for me," he said. "My father passed away in July, and I think about this all the time. He got to see me get sworn in."
        Commissioner Martin L. Goetsch has worked with Lauper for a dozen years and for a dozen years has enjoyed the stories Lauper tells.
        "I can't count how many times he's had me in tears of laughter from his stories," Goetsch said.
        However, Goetsch admires Lauper the most for his family values. Goetsch says he was impressed with the way Lauper took care of his mother in her later years. It was Lauper's first priority when he wrapped up the day at work, Goetsch said.
        "He would leave here and see her every chance he got," Goetsch said.
        Lauper recently lost both of his parents, and he makes regular trips to look in on his sister, Karen Lauper, who stays in an assisted-living facility outside Porterville.
        "He's a fine man, a fine parent and a fine son," Goetsch said.